"After a year of experiments, Hollywood has begun to embrace virtual reality as a potentially lucrative part of its future. 21st Century Fox has crafted an immersive clip using the film Wild, while Time Warner's HBO has created a similar experience with Game of Thrones."www.stuff.co.nz/techno...

Lytro_Immerge_Coast-light-field-camera-vrby WILL MASONNOVEMBER 5TH, 2015Earlier this year Lytro, the company behind the world’s first consumer light field camera, made a monumental $50 million pivot into the VR space.

At the time, the company was rather quiet as to what would come of that pivot but that didn’t stop our own Ryan Damm from sifting through the tea leaves to piece their plans together. In his article, Damm predicted that Lytro had pivoted with that money to create a light field camera for VR: “imagine Lytro produces a ‘camera’ that’s essentially a holographic box; it captures all the light rays entering a defined space. Using creative 2D slices, you could synthesize any perspective from within that box (and perhaps some beyond the box, looking back through it, with limited field of view).”

Well today, Damm gets to look like a prophet because that is exactly what Lytro has been working on, the world’s first live action light field 360º camera. Dubbed “Lytro Immerge,” Lytro’s new camera and the technology stack to go along with it represent a potentially massive step forward for high-end VR content creation.

Read More: Just what the heck is a light field anyway?

Right now in the virtual reality world, there is a lot of debate as to whether 360º video is actually VR. Ask Alan Yates, Valve’s Chief Pharologist, what he thinks about it and he will give you his honest opinion, and it isn’t a favorable one. But if you ask him about light field capture, well, that’s a whole different story:

Light field capture brings a dimensionality beyond anything we have seen with spherical video. Many companies, like Jaunt and NextVR for example, have claimed to capture light fields. Their cameras are able to add a degree of parallax, the ability to shift perspective, which while awesome isn’t really a light field. (For more on why that is be sure to check out Damm’s article on the subject).

Unlike standard 360º video, light field video captured with Lytro Immerge allows for six degrees of motion freedom within the camera’s volume, which is about one meter. This means that you could conceivably move around within the volume of the sphere and lean in toward objects. In addition to adding a degree of positionally tracked volume to the scene, a true light field recording like Lytro’s creates both horizontal and vertical parallax, giving the scene true depth and perspective regardless of your viewing angle."

Apelab is creating the first 360-degree animated series for virtual reality, and it’s coming to the Oculus Rift in 2016.

Back in 2014, a prototype of the “Sequenced” project won the Best in Play Award at the Game Developers Conference. Using the head movements of the player, the storyline changed depending on where the player gazed at critical moments in the story. Now, the developers at Apelab are back with an updated version with more gameplay to discover.

Set in 2065, Sequenced takes place in a world where resources are running out, where borders have collapsed and where humanity is slowly rebuilding itself. Players take on the role of a 13- year old orphan called Raven, who’s grown up in nature and whose DNA predestined her to become a Guardian.

Ah, saw it on Gizmodo and thought it was more recent. You can just see where this sort of thing will be in 5/10 years time. Kids will be battling swarms of robots/monsters with their friends in big, crazy battles, the same way we would have had water fights around the houses/streets when we were kids.

Yeah, that's the only thing that kinda annoys me about the HoloLens tech demos. Their hiding the fact that the FOV is pretty crap, really. That camera showing the whole living room is nothing like what the wearer would see. I'd be surprised if the wearer can even see all of the 'action' in those videos, never mind everything having to come from the exact same area of the wall to remain in the FOV. It will be something which will improve with time, I'm sure, but I just kinda think they're spoofing a fair bit with it, currently.

so all that cool shit MS show on the walls and happening around you only pops into view (on a small screen) once you look at it.. when in 10yrs they have your entire field of view as a screen then i'll take notice.. this is nothing more than another Kinect

One thing I read yesterday was that people were saying that the reason the FOV /seems/ narrower than some of the VR headsets is because it actually gives you that peripheral vision - eg. when all you have to view is that small VR window, it seems really immersive, but when you can see everything else too - it might break the illusion a bit. Still, I'd love to give it a go, I am kinda used to having a smaller window on the world as mentioned!

Barely showing it there, tbh. Most of that was full room shots and full size projections. Still fairly misleading, IMO. But I still think it's fair enough. It's early days and the tech will be refined in future versions, no doubt.

What I meant, RJ, was that if you took two VR images that are identical in FOV, resolution, etc, it's more immersive to /only/ see a VR image and nothing else, as opposed to seeing the VR image overlaid upon your full, real-life, field of vision. So people are seeing a /relatively/ similar FOV with HoloLens as with Oculus or whatever, but because they don't have black nothingness surrounding the images, it /seems/ like a smaller FOV. Does that make sense? I'm sure it'll still be too small for some, but hopefully the consumer hardware, whenever it arrives, will improve that slightly.

At this years CES LG will be demo’ing flexible OLED screens that can be rolled up, they also have see-through OLED tech in development and once all those parts converge.. i.e. 4K+Flexible+Transparent OLED screens that can fully wrap around a visor/glasses etc then and only then would Hololens interest me tbh, which isn’t that far off

i'm not doubting its potential, but like Kinect its technology thats full of amazing potential to really make a difference and its marketed as such but the reality is much much different.. seems to me to be Kinect part 2..

I don't really get the comparison with Kinect, these are completely different ideas. If you accept that VR and AR have a future (which you seem to), then that's different from an experimental console peripheral like Kinect.

I would note though that one of the original big features of Kinect was voice control, and that's everywhere now. Just because the device itself failed doesn't mean the ideas in it weren't without merit. And it's the ideas in HoloLens that interest me, not necessarily the device itself.

thats not what i was getting at, MS marketed Kinect as this perfect piece of tech and showed off demos that where mostly staged i.e. smoke & mirrors and the actual consumer version was to be blunt shit.. now fast forward and we have a new MS product being marketed as this perfect piece of tech and again adopting a smoke and mirrors campaign... ya feel me?

"What I meant, RJ, was that if you took two VR images that are identical in FOV, resolution, etc, it's more immersive to /only/ see a VR image and nothing else, as opposed to seeing the VR image overlaid upon your full, real-life, field of vision."

That not what is happening in VR, though. VR's FOV is pretty big. Even on Google Cardboard, the vast majority of what you can see at any time is the VR itself.

Don't think you understood what I meant there takki, because "the vast majority of what you can see at any time is the VR itself" is exactly why some journalists are saying that VR /seems/ more immersive to most people than AR with a similar FOV. Here's one that says what I mean better than I'm doing: www.thurrott.com/mobil...

Don't think they're similar in that way RJ, because the vast majority of the hype around HoloLens is coming from practically every journalist that's used the real, shipping, developer version of the hardware. The Project Natal 'demos' were never experienced by regular people the way this is.

"One negative to come out of the show was the knowledge that the viewer's limited field of view isn't likely to get much better anytime soon. While the hardware isn't final, said HoloLens head Kudo Tsunoda, the field of view, which feels like looking through a mobile computer monitor, won't be "hugely noticeably different either."

Matthew, I mean that pretty much everywhere you look in a VR headset has the VR in your vision. Clearly the HoloLens only works when you look through a small rectangular area right in the front of your vision. What I'm saying is that in VR you also have that small rectangle area right in front, but surrounding that by quite a large field is more VR screen/visuals. Not sure what point you're trying to make out in regards VR *seeming* like it has more immersion. It obviously has a larger FOV and it doesn't require you to be looking straight ahead.

But it's /really/ hard to compare VR and AR on a straight technical level because I believe they use very, very different techniques for projects.

RJ, I dunno, it seems like there's so much hype even in that TechRadar piece too - lots of superlatives. I want to try it myself before I say anything about the execution, just wish there were Microsoft stores in the UK or Ireland that had demo units.